King Of The Mods: Arma 3 Zeus DLC Let’s You Play As A DM

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“Assume the role of the game master,” starts the website about Arma 3‘s coming Zeus DLC. For a brief moment I pictured my face floating above the Arma 3’s Greek islands, digitally smeared like the late Sir Patrick Moore‘s.

Alas, this is even better. A new mode for Arma 3’s multiplayer where one player can act as a kind of dungeon master, using a real-time editor to craft or tweak multiplayer scenarios on the fly. It’s like having an AI director, only the director is your friend and even more malicious.
There’s not much more information than that currently available, although the website mentions that there’ll be a livestreamed reveal on February 15th at 5pm GMT.

Still, you can already imagine its potential. Arma has long been better for its user-created multiplayer scenarios than its Bohemia-made singleplayer campaigns (though those are good too), and the idea of making those multiplayer scenarios more reactive and surprising sounds like only a good thing.

I recently played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time, in my first pen-and-paper gaming experience. As Ulmo the Halfling Warlock tromped around, missing attack rolls and floundering with friends, I wondered something: why is this fun for the dungeon master?

Jim was the dungeon master, and so I asked: he said that he gets to create an entire world and weave stories through it. Oh! That sounds great; why didn’t I think of that?

Arma 3’s Zeus update made immediate sense by comparison. Editing tools? I love those! Using them in real-time to craft improvised play experiences for friends? That sounds like a wonderful opportunity for screwing with people in creative ways that are fun for everyone. Also, it sounds a little like Sleep Is Death, of which I was a fan (of playing).

24 Comments

A distraction from the real issue which is that multiplayer performance is still well below 30 fps regularly because of a CPU limitation in the game (its basically single threaded). They have had the problem since the Alpha, 11 months later its still very hard to get playable FPS in the game in multiplayer. Adding dynamic stuff is only going to make that worse.

Its all well and good they have released a mode like this, but there were mods such as MCC that did a similar thing developed by the community, with 3D editors and all sorts of useful capabilities. Bohemia interactive just don’t seem able to focus on what is important to their dwindling player base, which is to fix their broken arse game. Instead of making their own versions of community mods they should be fixing the FPS problems, all hands on deck.

BIS is not exactly known for having focused development. Sometimes it feels like there are only 4 people working on Arma3 and they’re all working on whatever they feel like. There is a metric ton of stuff that the community has been asking for to be fixed and added that has been sternly ignored by BIS to this date.

Unfortunately I have to agree. It’s adding DLCs to unfinished game, that’s still in beta phase (just look at changelogs, they are now starting to work on getting physics to, erm, work).
If big budget developer did that, we would have news like that: link to rockpapershotgun.com

I get a solid 50+ FPS on Wastland in ARMA 3…still not sure why everyone else has so many issues.
4.6Ghz processor..took some fiddling with the cfg and launch options…but it’s so good now I feel like I’m cheating compared to everyone stuck at 30fps.

This could open the way for mods featuring a couple of my favorite game genre type things; RTS+FPS (Something like ‘Natural Selection’, or the Half-Life 2 Mod ‘Empires’.) and FPS vs RTS (Which there was also a Half-Life 2 mod of but I don’t remember what it’s called. I just like the idea of asymmetrical fighting)

It all depends on how much you can limit the DM-mode. Which is probably the opposite of what Bohemia is trying to do, but still!

Zombie Master! (or you might be thinking of Overwatch, but Zombie Master did it better) Even though the zombie master was slightly overpowered in some situations, a lot of players understood that it the goal wasn’t to win but to give everyone a good time by throwing interesting and fair obstacles in their way and contrasting moments of tension with eerie moments of relative peace and quiet. I had no intention of ever considering Arma 3 but now it’s definitely got my attention.

Back in the days where ARPS and Folk where still seperate groups and all that, we had great fun playing with VTS, which was basically this but for Arma 2.
It’s some of the most fun I have had in this game. Or in any game, for that matter.

Whats next full rights to use everything they use and make a game for nothing. Seems like they made it so they have no choices left after this. Some things in business need to be kept back and out of reach otherwise you got mayhem, bullshit and mass empty pockets.

This looks more polished and generally better, but there has been a long-standing mod for Arma 2 and 3 called “Mission Control Centre” which does pretty much exactly the same thing. I show it off (poorly) here: link to youtube.com